Thursday, April 4, 2013

Skimping on brain food -- April 5, 2013 column

President Barack Obama
says “the next great American project” will be mapping human brain activity.

The budget he will send
Congress Wednesday calls for $110 million for his brain initiative in fiscal
2014, which begins Oct. 1.

Even Newt Gingrich and
Eric Cantor support brain research. Former Republican House Speaker Gingrich
said Obama “deserved credit for taking an important step in the right
direction.” And House Majority Leader
Cantor said in a statement it’s “exactly the type of research we should be
funding…it’s great science.”

Before we go all gooey
about gridlock thawing in Washington, a new space race or our 21st Century
Camelot, let’s take a deep breath. The president proposes, Congress disposes.
And $110 million -- bold?

Don’t get me wrong. You’d
have to be living in a cave not to support the effort to unlock the mysteries
of the brain. We need this research, and we need it now. But it’s hardly a done
deal. There’s plenty of time for Republican mischief making. And about that federal
effort of $110 million a year – that doesn’t say bold or audacious. It says modest. Piddling.

I get the rationale
for starting small. Maybe it’s the best the president can hope for in the Honey-
I-Shrank-Uncle-Sam era. But in modern America, $110 million is small potatoes.

It’s Justin Bieber’s
net worth. He’s 19.

It’s the listing price
of a penthouse apartment in New York City last year. OK, the apartment was near
Carnegie Hall, but still.

It’s even just three-tenths
of 1 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s annual budget, according to
Francis Collins, the director.

He said in a live chat
via Twitter that NIH is in a “pickle” after budget cuts over 10 years that
lopped 20 percent of purchasing power for research. Sequestration is draining
$1.5 billion from NIH this year, he said.

So don’t let cold-eyed
budget hawks tell you $110 million is a large sum. The Human Genome Project got
about $300 million a year from Uncle Sam. Total federal investment was $3.8
billion. The project to map the human genome took 13 years.

Obama likes to tell
audiences that every dollar spent on the genome project generated $140 in
economic output. Not bad.

Republican Cantor suggested
“reprioritizing the $250 million we currently spend on political and social
science research” for the brain initiative. It almost sounded as if Cantor was
doubling the president’s bid on brain research. Wouldn’t that be fun? More
likely, Cantor was trying to show he’s for the brain, conservatively speaking.

Obama envisions his
initiative as “giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture
of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and
how we remember. And that knowledge could be – will be – transformative.”

After a decade of war,
no politician will, or should, ever say we’re doing all we can to help our
wounded warriors with traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress
disorder. No one can tell families struggling to help loved ones that we should
wait to look for ways to treat, cure or even prevent Alzheimer’s, autism,
epilepsy, Parkinson’s and strokes.

And yet, such
practical applications of the BRAIN project -- Brain Research through Advancing
Innovative Neurotechnologies – are far off. Obama didn’t mention a timeline or
even a definite goal.

Three federal agencies will contribute money to the research in the year
that begins Oct. 1: National Institutes of Health, $40 million; Defense Advanced Research Projects, $50
million; and the National Science Foundation, $20 million.

Some say this isn’t the right time begin a new project
because of budget woes, but Collins says research has progressed to the point
where putting it on hold is wrong.

The federal government will work with four
foundations on brain research. The Allen Institute for Brain Science has agreed
to spend $60 million annually on projects related to the initiative; Howard
Hughes Medical Institute, $30 million annually; the Kavli Foundation, $4
million a year over 10 years; and Salk
Institute for Biological Studies, $28 million.

It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.

“I wish we could go
faster,” Collins said on the live Twitter chat. “Maybe we’ll be able to ramp it
up.”